High School Students and the Sense of Right and Wrong

I got one of those emails today. For those of you that are unaware of emails in today's world of high school educational settings; teachers receive these blazing letters of complaint and reprimand from parents about a variety of topics involving their student(s). It really is annoying for the most part, and over the years has caused me to have an intense dislike (is there a button for that?) of emails in general as mode of communication. This year however, the gripes have been sparse, and to be truthful, I was glad to finally have a parent complaint that I could dissect and respond to as an annual ritual of teacher hood!

The funny thing is that after preparing and teaching the Mere Christianity discussion last Sunday, I suddenly became aware of the quarrel that the parent was having. Oddly enough, it struck me that the sense of right and wrong was not occurring between myself and the parent, or even between myself and the student. That sense of right and wrong was self evident in the correspondence as a quarrel or conflict between the parent and child. So here is what struck me today as I conferred with the child and responded to the parent. The young adult knew the moral authority, and they knew that sense of fairness, and I knew this immediately with one joking smile that I gave them about the nature of the conflict with their parent. It was just a look they gave me, and a sheepish grin. And then I felt sorry for the parent at that moment and forgave them for lashing out at what they perceived to be injustice for the child. This moment of realization caused me to have compassion for the parent, and to seek to solve their conflicting emotions with definite resolution for the side of the right and good and fair things involving the child.

"It is only our bad temper that we put down to being tired or worried or hungry; we put our good temper down to ourselves." says CS Lewis. But in this instance I put my good temper to a conscious study of Christian principals and an awareness that acknowledging the right and wrong in our workplace and our home causes us to discern between the two and make a choice. Will we side on the Right or cave in to the Wrong side of our nature? It is my belief today that the discipline of studying and praying about such matters yields a feeling of satisfaction at the end of a long day. Perhaps this is "mere" Christianity?